Tuesday, July 17, 2007

I'm not dead yet...

…but wow, I’d forgotten how painful moving is. Not painful in the “so sorry to see you go” way. No, the goodbyes have been sweet, and appreciated, and since we’re moving to the Bay Area, we’re already scheduling visitors – it’s not like we’re never seeing our friends again. No, it’s painful in the “what day is it? What thousand things need to be done by noon or this entire plan we’ve constructed will fall apart?” kind of way.

In other words, this week has been grueling. It’s hard to remember that I found out I was moving just a scant six weeks ago. In that time, we’ve listed our house (after doing a solid 2 weeks of non-stop fix-it work), bought a house (and closed – yesterday!), donated approximately 30 car-fulls of stuff to Goodwill (no, Betsy, nothing you’d really go for), scheduled our move, and, here we are, right in the middle of the move, and Robin and I are still speaking to each other. So I consider the move an unmitigated success. So far, at least. :)

I’ve got a whole blog post on the amazing apps/services that have made this move possible. On this kind of compressed timeframe, it’s just unfathomable to think of how much harder this would have been without Sittercity, Angie’s List, Google Docs, and others. But one app I stumbled on to last night that has already proven tremendously useful, and 24 hours in, I can tell it’ll completely change my day-to-day productivity. I’m talking about Remember the Milk, a web-based todo list. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? Except that it syncs with Google Gears, so you can have an offline copy of your todo list (which is editable offline, and will re-sync with the cloud when you’re back online.) And a mobile version, so you can view it from your Blackberry. And todos can be e-mailed in. And, the piece de resistance, an incredibly elegant (that’s actually not doing it justice) integration with Google Calendar. I’m late to the party; Lifehacker of course wrote about these guys nearly two years ago, and quite a bit since then, more recently here sharing how RTM + GTD = acronym bliss, not to mention actual productivity nirvana.

Put it all together, and my web-based groupware OS is complete. Gmail (plus the required GTDInbox Firefox extension), Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Remember the Milk. I now have e-mail management, shared calendars, shared documents, and shared tasks. (Even better, I can keep work and personal info separate – while still getting a complete view across both – thanks to the seamless integration of these systems for both corporate and personal use.)

I’ll write more up on this later – I’ve just spent the last 6 hours plowing through the day’s e-mails to stay on top of work, and the movers show up early this morning to finish packing us up. But I just couldn’t resist plugging this incredible service – is it really possible it’s just two people? That’s nutty.